OLD CROW 151 



White Pass had concluded the usefidness of the Porcupine route for 

 transport and it has remained unused except by the resident Indians 

 and an occasional traveler. In 1926 Olaus Murie visited Old Crow 

 in summer and banded some birds, and Otto Geist traveled along the 

 Old Crow and Porcupine Rivers in 1964 and 1955 surveying the 

 region for fossils. Otherwise there is no record of biological attention 

 to the Porcupine, although the river provides an easy course for 

 travel. 



Physiography and Climate 



At Old Crow the Porcupine River is about 350 yards wide between 

 cut banks about 15 feet high. Its current is swift but there are no 

 falls along its length, and for a light boat it is an excellent waterway. 

 At the ramparts along the Alaska Yukon border the Porcupine has cut 

 a gorge through the highlands between the Ogilvie Mountains and the 

 Brooks Range. Above the ramparts the river meanders through a 

 valley between bluffs about 100 feet high and from two to five miles 

 apart. At Old Crow the river has commonly cut from ten to twenty 

 feet below the level of its valley plain through layers of fine dark 

 sandy soil on top underlain with gravel, but sand and gravel layers 

 have been much intermixed by the floods and meandering of the river. 

 On this more or less flat valley white spruce is common, often mixed 

 with birch and some poplar. In wetter parts willow and alder often 

 form dense thickets. The valley between the bluffs looks like a flood 

 plain of the present river, which in fact now floods much of its area 

 in spring. 



The bluffs north of the village are of a fine grained soil like loess 

 into which the present flood plain has been cut. In places the bluffs 

 are overgrown and in others still bare and eroding. A fragrant sage 

 is one of the plants which settles upon the slopes even before they 

 cease to slide. The bluffs are cut by steep ravines. Half a mile north 

 of the bluffs the land rises to about 300 feet above the village, which 

 is at an elevation of about 900 feet. Beyond this point a gentle rise, 

 with black spruce gradually replacing the white, continues for about 

 two miles to an altitude of about 1,600 feet, where the spruce forest 

 gives way to a half-mile- wide ascending band of willow and alder, be- 

 yond which is reached the tundra at the foot of the Old Crow Moun- 

 tains. These rise abruptly to about 3,300 feet on their southern side, 

 with some steep slopes and slides of the sedimentary rocks of which 

 they are formed. 



To the northwestward the Old Crow Mountains are detached from 

 the Brooks Range by several low, wooded valleys. Forests also ex- 

 tend along the Old Crow River to the northern margin of Crow Flats, 



469496—60 11 



